Lovely April
by twentyfiveraven
Summary: There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon. Sachiko, Misa, and Sayu. Post-series. Slow descent into insanity, insane amounts of descriptive writing, senility, character death.


**The Lovely April**

_Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee  
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.  
--William Shakespeare_

Iron

They tell her that her husband is dead, his body riddled with lead, his bones shot through with quicksilver, piercing tendon and muscle and marrow and delicate, golden heart (because he was shot at such a close range that the bullets ripped through like winter wind, ice-fanged and ruthless), and Sachiko does not break down and she does not scream and she does not cry. She goes into the kitchen and gets a steak knife and starts shearing her hair, ream by ream, the noise of steel sawing through newly-made-widow's hair seeming to echo, each one an open-mouthed wail of mourning.

They tell her that the man who should have been her husband is dead, his lifeblood unraveling itself, venom (no, ink, bone-white, on a page in a black-bound notebook) shot into his heart like the collagen she once considered for her rosebud lips, and she can see in their eyes hatred, and pity, and she does the only thing she can think of, that she's good at, that she knows how. She acts like nothing is wrong, and laughs them off, saying that Misa-Misa doesn't like jokes like that, but then her bell chime laughter turns to metal and she can't help the black mud that runs down her cheeks.

They tell her that her father is dead, that her brother is dead, and she says nothing.

Lost

She goes out grocery shopping one day, mechanized, some clockwork thing, mute to the sympathetic whispers in her wake, soft and rustling like a breeze through a grassy field, and even passing strangers notice how detached she looks, the way she moves her soft hands as if they were completely unfettered from her arms, how her jagged, short hair bares her face and the aged creases of her throat. It takes Sachiko half an hour to find the car, and when she finally she finds it she clutches the steering wheel and cries so hard she can barely breathe.

She talks to herself, to her reflection distorted in the rounded backs of silver spoons, to the shadow fastened to her heels, to her eyes that focus and unfocus against her will, changing from blue to red to glowing hazel. But Misa never talks to herself in the mirror, she only stares, watching this girl that looks like her only so far away, pressing her palms to the glass to see if she might one day fall through, and be forever lost in Wonderland.

She stays inside her mind unwillingly, wandering a shadowed labyrinth without yarn or love to guide her, lit by the screams of newly dead ghosts, followed by hounds that eat her mother's hair. Sayu only knows she is alive when she dreams, and her father pushes her gently from a swing.

Sunday

She sits at the table, the table her whole family used to sit around, laughing, bantering, teasing good-naturedly with voices warm as candle wax, and she stares at the tabletop, which still holds a bit of luster from her constant polishing of the wood, all varnish and elbow grease and faint umber reflections. Soichiro used to praise her, and sometimes she would snip at him because it was just housework, in the end it would mean nothing, earning no feasible reward, and Sachiko's wedding band is cold as she digs it into her hairline, so hard it leaves a mark.

She wakes up early in the mornings, humming American songs because that's really all they play on the radio in Los Angeles, and she combs her long yellow hair and paints her face in all the cheery colors of happiness and feigned ignorance, because she is still an actress and will forever remain one. Misa vowed this to herself once she moved back here, promised it to her tiny, dim reflection, fun-house mirror twisted in the jet black beads of her cross, a tear glistening just as bright as California sun at the memory of vows she'd hoped to keep, before she tells herself to forget.

She closes her eyes, because leaving them open tastes like a lie, and her mother has had enough of those. It's the first action Sayu consciously does, before she fades away yet again, and thinks no more of eyes or mothers or living, because her father is back again, and her tiny hands clutch the swing chains, a laughing bird in the sunlight.

Dolls

Her sister, Kiku, calls every weekend, and whenever she actually picks up the phone her lips turn inward and she washes the dishes compulsively, by hand, watching her hands chameleon red under the hot water, forgetting the gloves on purpose (because the heat, the burn, it reminds her that she can still feel something that's not regret or grief or any other nameless obsidian shard of emotion). Kiku, she still has a husband, still has a son and a daughter, to dote on, to give books and toys for their birthdays, still has warm bodies alongside her as she sleeps, still has a whole heart, and despite all her phone line sobs and hushed words, to Sachiko, it is unforgivable.

She goes back to putting her hair in pigtails, ruffling the delicate lace hem of her skirt, running her glossy black fingertips over fishnets and silk and buckles and patent leather, crosses dangling from her neck, beside an hourglass that she sees in the mirror only _sometimes_. Misa, she dresses herself for some extravagant gothic tea party, ribbons and bows in her hair, stockings on her feet, red lipstick (between the laugh lines she blissfully ignores, though they chisel themselves in deeper with every word she speaks to herself), porcelain faced as a china doll, glassy eyes and all.

She _remembers_, and she knows she remembers because there is a difference between remembering and dreaming, an invisible veil between the two, as if the former was at the bottom of a pool, and she had just submerged her face in the water, catching a glimpse of it, winking at her from the depths. Sayu remembers a boy, a boy with knobby knees and hair like a bright copper coin, taking a needle to her ragdoll and methodically unstitching her front from her back, surgically cold, and Sayu had cried, and the boy had called her a tattle-tale, and her doll never looked quite the same after that.

Window

She gives herself over to spring cleaning, much as she used to, but it's different this time, because she's not doing it for pride or praise or colorless boredom she never could admit to—she's doing it because she needs to, because she should, and she sets to the task on her hands and knees and brushing wisps of sweat-stained hair behind her ears. Sachiko gives meaning to the term _with a vengeance_, because every scrub, every sweep, every surface is dedicated to her husband because he was _stupid_ enough to get himself killed, to her daughter who was _weak_ enough to let her soul run dry, and to her son, who was childish enough to believe he could make his _own_ paradise, when it was _right there_ outside his bedroom window.

She goes shopping along Rodeo Drive, twirling, ballerina-silly, past all those glitzy stores, giggling at her own face in the windows, churlishly full of herself, and on the corner a man is standing passing out fliers—hideously orange and emblazoned with gigantic, angry words, shouting at her about how ignorant she was to Kira's cause, how the battle for true justice was still ongoing, how she should call this number to find out the truth. Misa trips in her flighty dance across the sidewalk, suddenly clumsy and frightened and deeply sad, and in her darkened reflection between two crucified mannequins she sees her eyes glow red, and the inch of dark, dark roots revealed between the yellow.

She smells flowers. Flowers, on the windowsill. Chrysanthemums, kinda fuzzy feeling between her fingers. When she rubs them, they make a tiny, downy rustle, like baby bird feathers. They smell like beauty, or happiness incarnate. She smiles.

Sayu turns to face her mother, the breakfast tray broken and smashed and leaking at her feet.

"Hi, Mom."

Mend

She twists dishrags fitfully between her fingers, picking lint off of her apron like a finch pecking at seeds, but then she remembers her daughter upstairs, sitting up and going through photo albums, scrapbooks, a soothing balm on her aching wound of nostalgia, and puts it off no longer. Sachiko calls her sister Kiku, because Kiku is a realtor whose husband is a travel agent, and she does not reach for the dish soap because although she could not prevent the priceless crystal vase of her family from falling to pieces, it is still up to her to put what's left of it back together.

She frets, talking to herself in louder voices, in different pitches, ranging from screechy to sonorous, and somehow ends up cleaning out the closet, piling her petticoats and frills on her mattress, sure that this will solve all her problems, because there in the back is a gray and black striped ghost with a moth-eaten collar, smelling of expensive aftershave and a curse upon her poor (not very) blonde head. Misa rips apart the man's shirt with her bare hands, cackling gleefully, only then she remembers the smell, the smell, and _Light, _her _Light_, and blood spots the tatters as she tries to sew them back together, the needle impaling her fingertips.

She buries herself down in between her patchwork bedcovers, snugly embraced by fleece, a strange blend of blissful and scared out of her mind, her faith in the world almost utterly nonexistent, like a red balloon she let go of just to see how high it would go, confident it would be drawn faithfully back into her palm, but now it's just a speck in unfathomable blue, destined to die. Sayu knows, though, that there is still good in the world, there has to be, there must be, because her mother strokes her hair and tells her that it is so.

Summer

She almost forgot how the sun used to kiss her, chaste gilded lips leaving streaks of gold and red in their wake, and she remembers sand castles and the hissing percussion of ocean waves, back when her face wasn't _quite _so lined and her skin didn't gravitate _quite _so steeply towards the earth, (she packs away the ghost of her son in boxes, in crates, all his awards and achievements and she can _feel_ those wrinkles carving themselves into her face, like penstrokes, and it seems like the sun doesn't even _exist_ anymore). But Sachiko lays on her back in the front yard (not hers anymore) in her gardening clothes, the wide disk of her sun hat shading her face, listening the sound of Kiku nailing the 'sold' sign into place, of her daughter laughing, and she welcomes the sunlight back like an old friend.

She wakes up in the afternoon now, almost close to sunset, and her answering machine barks at her that she's late for a job she doesn't remember having, (except maybe a flash of strobe lights and stage and men with gluttonous hands) but she ignores it and goes to put on her makeup, cursing the infernal LA heat and the suffocating smog pillowcase bent on smothering them all and all her precious cosmetics have all but melted inside their plastic cases. Misa applies it anyway, because it is her face now, this is her face—a sweaty mess of color, blush caked on too thickly to hide the hollowed cheeks, striped with melting mascara, lipstick smeared, staining her teeth pink and drawing up a smile on one side of her face—yes, this is her face, the face of some sick joke, the crying clown, the virgin whore, the queen of broken hearts.

She takes a deep breath, clutching at her mother's hand, twenty-one but rightfully terrified of planes, considering the circumstances of her last trans-Pacific flight—plus the fact her opalescent glass psyche is far too fragile to remember all of it, so the massive churning engines somewhere in the belly of this shrieking metal thing are unpleasant. But Sayu steels herself, because she _does_ want to go back—this was where she lost a part of herself, and her father, somewhere in the cities and the sand, and Mom learned English from Dad so they'll be able to get by, and she smiles a little, thinking this, because she feels buoyant and precarious as a fledgling on an outstretched branch, which is funny because she's already flying.

Recall

She has to remember all her old skills—with knife and tongs and wooden spoon, bowls clapping against each other in stony _chink_s, eggshell white and stacked ceiling-high—and it makes sweat gather across the bridge of her nose and above her lip, but it's so nice to be around people, trilling away in her native tongue, making fun of the Americans with their fly-lens sunglasses, the corpulent males and chopstick-thin women. Sachiko, though, makes _friends_, and everyone in the steakhouse calls her "Kaa-san", asking her for advice, confident in the empathy in her eyes, warm and brown like baking chocolate.

She sees names now, and numbers, floating in glowing scarlet above people's heads, ill omens, harbingers of death, sure as broken mirrors fragmenting souls to pieces, and she doesn't understand why she knows that they mean death but she _knows_, so she stays in her apartment and shouts down at people, says the names penned above their heads, scrawls the numbers on her wall in red lipstick. Misa, she doesn't realize that all she's writing on the walls is 'Kira', over and over again, and what she's shouting down to the passersby is only 'I'm sorry, Misa is so very sorry'.

She makes the dean's list, but doesn't go to celebrate conventionally with her new American friends (with their bottles and loud laughter and uncomplicated pasts); she drives through ink desert, streets she thinks she remembers, and is still achingly surprised to see that it hasn't been knocked down and rebuilt, that the wreckage of everything—false idols, evil, and such fleeting goodness—is still there. Sayu kneels down in the rubble and sifts the dark-gray dust between her palms, and drives back to the ocean, and when she finds the quietest, most beautiful place she can, uncurls her hands and lets the ashes of her father bless the air, before the ocean wind carries them west, toward home.

Songs

She sings old Japanese songs, in a mockingbird alto with a foreign twang, ballads she used to dance to with Soichiro, the two of them both helpless romantics and horribly clumsy, the couple everyone swore would get married and stay together forever. Sachiko pauses in her sweeping, thinking how flighty was 'forever', but she keeps singing the songs, because if those molten golden notes, those heartstring plucked lyrics, those memories of being held so preciously in his strong arms, if those weren't eternity, she didn't know what was.

She sings hymns to herself, in her apartment, feeling her face peel off in rainbow flakes, waxy smudges still there from the lipstick and the eyeliner, smeared like a pathetic five-year old signature across her sheets. Misa, her hair mottled black and yellow and green, sticking to her face and neck, still done up like a princess in crosses that lie and traitorous silk and lace that yellows and rots and crumbles as she looks at it, she sings about God, and little lights that she will let shine, bright as the numbers she sees above everyone's head but her own.

She tries out a karaoke bar for laughs, euphoric and candy-coated like a kid, singing her heart out to some preceding-era-anthem to uproarious applause, and the fact she put the words on the prompter in Japanese intrigues a well-beyond-acceptable-looking foreign exchange student to buy her a drink. Sayu, though, doesn't expect the pain that rockets through her body when he offhandedly mentions Kira, as if someone rapped her spinal cord with a tenor fork, and she excuses herself, poppies blooming on her cheeks and green fire trapped between her eyelids.

Night

She steps out onto the veranda, the air cool on her bare arms, white and smooth as lily petals, the metal of her wedding band _ping_ing against the railing, and she looks out over the city, glittering incandescent, electric folly, palm trees as lovely as coy young girls, bendy and hiding their faces with broad fans, the courtesan oleanders with their prettily perfumed poison, all accentuated by silver brushstrokes of moonlight. And Sachiko thinks what a strange and wonderful place this new Eden is, thinks what a shame that more people don't notice what they have until it's gone, thinks that all this place needs is a few cherry blossoms.

She stumbles out onto the balcony, dragon breath searing her bare shoulders, the ends of her hair (badger stripes, and the miniature tar pits around her eyes complete the roadkill look) crackling audibly, the air is so hot, and sweat begins to pearl along her shoulders, because now she goes bare as Eve, determined not to bite the fruit, not to eat anything at all. Misa lets the Santa Anas slit her skin open with hot blades, watches the luminescent line of fires looping their way through the hills, swallowing up the scrub brush with spade tongues, and she knows they could eat her body, have her flesh for kindling, because after all, she exists solely for the purpose of others.

She relinquishes the tension knotting her shoulder blades, lets the hot wind and the cool wind toss her hair back and forth in front of her face, her back flat against the slant of roof and her eyes open wide and on the sky. Sayu contemplates neither Earth nor Hell nor Heaven, although she traces angel eyes in the constellations far above her (two pairs—one honest, and framed with glasses, and the other full of deceit) noticing the moonlight shimmering through the smoke, sometimes refracting into beautiful curlicues and butterfly wings, and the smell of bougainvilleas is somehow sweeter with the world burning underneath it.

Honeymoon

She buries her toes into the nicely hot sand, studded with bottle caps and sea-shells and leisurely bronzing people, closing her eyes and letting the sun wash over her. It seems, in a strange, pleasant sort of way, to take almost no effort at all, and then Sachiko is there, watching the sea from the other side, Soichiro asleep in a longue chair, and she beside him, watching her blue-lipped children, conjoined by their hands, flash like darting black fish amid the waves, until the vision melts away, trailing a kite-ribbon-tail easily through her mind's eye.

She stands in the scorching deluge of the shower head, yellow and black dripping from her nude body, her ribs protruding like fish gills, closed, all the intricately linked bones of her spine showing, and her face comes off, burned raw by the water. Misa steps out of the shower, and the mirrors are fogged, and once bared she does not know herself, and she sits on the toilet and cries hysterically, because how will Light recognize her _now_?

She weaves her hand through his, both of them collegiately ink-stained, flat against the books' dry leaves, and he smiles at her and squeezes, turning back to his pages. Sayu watches him for a little while longer, grateful for how different he is from her previous boyfriend, who could speak in the strained vowels of her native tongue but kept promising her the world, a perfect, suspended life, and she had pledged to never again let herself be shackled by another man's ideals, a skewed oil painted realism on a canvas of lies.

Chosen

She takes a day off for no reason, paying no attention to her daughter's chirruping chides, tying back her silvered hair with a cloth and donning an apron, singing to herself, matching the rhythm of her old vinyl albums with her swishing broom and wet slapping mop, the dappled sunlight through the windows chasing her aging heels. Sachiko fills her corporeal hallways with music, ignoring the arthritic ache in her knees and knuckles, but the ones in her head are filled with laughter, the smell of rice cooking, and the sound of children's' feet pounding on floorboards in a merry drumbeat.

She dreams about a monster plastered with pinnacles of white bone in fantastic shapes like coral polyps, one slit-pupil eye staring at her from underneath the bandages swathed beneath the pallid tresses of its hair, dream-calling: _Rem, you sought me out, right, to give me the notebook. It must have been fate. Why else would a shinigami love a human? Why else would a girl like me ever run into Light? I was destined to meet Light, to love him forever. Right? _Misa, even in her sleep, feels her blood run cold when Rem's bloated-corpse-purple lips smile, ever so slightly, and disintegrate into a sparkling torrent of sand and ash.

She follows him, blindfolded, laughing, wondering what's this all about, why he insists on dragging her by the hand away from the cacophony of the graduation party, why her mother has this knowing twinkle in her eye, and in the quiet she hears the warm mutter of dozens of candle flames, the perfume of primroses, and there's a reason _why_ she earned the satin mantle of salutatorian. On one knee, he doesn't promise her utopia—instead, happiness, instead, peace; and that's all Sayu ever really wanted.

Winter

She travels with her daughter and her fiancé to his parents' house in the mountains, because her daughter insisted and didn't want to leave her alone rather than real want of going, but she obliges, wanting to her meet his parents (purportedly each half-Japanese and half something else, but to her utter bewilderment, fluent in Japanese, English, and some other anomalous language). Their house is big and stone as if cut from the cliff face itself, and Sachiko marvels at the hoarfrost and the silver scent of pines, full of astonishment at the depth and weight of the snow, so much colder than her reminisces (but proud, and aching, when she spots the black torque wick of a cherry blossom tree trunk in the courtyard, dusted prettily with white).

She sits on the cold bench, her hair darker than anyone could have imagined or remembered, her aquamarine irises diluted with more than a year of pain, turned the color of melted snow, and she while she waits she unbuckles her shoes and slips them from her feet, and no one pays her any undue attention, because all her prized lace and silk and satin and ruffles and bows and ribbons lie in ruin in her apartment, slashed into the shape of shattered hearts. Misa leaves her bag on the bench, and stands with her feet growing colder and colder on the edge of the station platform, and once the rumble of the train becomes a metal roar she leaps; giving her body to the face of the machine, the impact so great all her bones become powder, fine as sand.

She's the one who hears it, in the middle of all the cozy conversation with her future in-laws, and she asks to turn the volume up to hear, and she gasps and drops the remote when the news anchor says "suicide", and she can't stop the tears welling up, recollecting the flaxen-haired pixie of vivacity for the first time in such a long time. Sayu is surprised when they excuse themselves and her mother stifles a sob into her soft palms, because the woman knows that she could do nothing to stop her son becoming what he did, but she can't help it, she's a mother, and a good mother doesn't raise serial killers, a good mother keeps her family intact, a good mother doesn't hear about a girl bequeathing her body to a train and feel like it's her fault.

Wine

She thinks how beautiful her daughter is in traditional Japanese wedding garb, looking so much lovelier than at her coming-of-age ceremony with life and laughter sparking in her big eyes, and she is so proud of her daughter, for being so strong, for she herself is prone to bouts of weakness, an influence too strong, too ephemeral, to resist forever. Sachiko leaves the crowd of well-wishers (getting along fine with the Japanese-and-English speaking ones, and mostly at a loss with the others) and goes out to get a breath of fresh air, willing her heart not to turn over and face the millstones, but the severance of yet another family member is a wound too raw to ignore, and she thinks wistfully on the parts of her past that remain untouched and painless.

She knows her mother would not want to miss the toasts; even if it is a bit Western, her mother enjoys the sentiment all the same, and she is a bit shocked to see her mother, a clay garden stature, who startles from her reverie with a gasp and a sudden, brutal confession: "I feel like my family is breaking again. It gets smaller and smaller, all the time." And Sayu smiles, and the silk of her robe is creamy on her mother's hand, guiding her back into the smiling mouths and eyes, saying, "But Kaa-san, it's just the opposite. Your family is _growing_."

Fallen

She places a sleek entourage of illustrious businessmen at the wrong table, switching them with a herd of cuttlefish-boned Caucasians celebrating a birthday, and the manager, he really has no choice, doesn't she see, Kaa-san, that's the third mix-up that's happened this week alone, he doesn't want to, especially since she's been with them for so long, worked her way up from a cook to the hostess, bringing in new business with that son-in-law of hers, but this is the final straw. Sachiko had known it was coming, though, and holds no grudges, she merely bows and apologizes, and she only cries when her friends from the restaurant staff throw her a 'sayonara' party, and she stammers _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, what was your name again?_

She stands on the edge of the station platform, the end of her umbrella dripping tears onto the stone, and tries to imagine what had been going through Misa's mind to make her fling her emaciated body into the metal maw of a _train, _wondering if she could soak up the answer through her feet by some kind of osmosis, the ghost of a lost girl creeping up the soles of her feet. Sayu knows she shouldn't be bitter, but she offers up a blasphemous little prayer to the would-be god, the brother she remembers almost _too _vividly, hoping that he's happy with his sacrifice, that's he's happy people still throw their arms around his pedestal, suddenly throwing her umbrella to the sewers and screaming at the rain _why did he have to keep _taking, _why wasn't he satisfied, why, why_?

Believe

It's not at all like she imagines, so much so that she insists that nothing is wrong, tucking in the navy blue sheets of Light's, Sayu's her own bed underneath the coverlet, humming a tune she once danced to when she was a girl, kicking up the dust of her youth. Sachiko walks throughout her house, one hand holding her apron, and she does not see the walls—instead of mere palaces of memory, her age has inspired kingdoms, all with curved roofs, wandering the halls and garden paths with knowing feet, so engrossed in the cavernous depths of her fantasy she doesn't even realize she's losing her way.

She can't help spilling tea all down her front when her mother calls her _Raito_, scalding the front of her blouse green, and Sachiko realizes her err with a sad little smile and helps to dry her off, making sure to call her Sayu as she kisses the top of her head. And Sayu inhales her mother's peach-soapy smell, and hasn't the heart to tell her she's been calling her daughter _Soichiro _on the phone more times than she can remember, and twines her hands around her mother's waist, burying her hands in her warm belly like a child, catching a glimpse of her mother's left hand, a quiet stripe around one finger from a misplaced wedding band.

Blooms

She always sits by the window, gazing out the cleaner-streaked glass with her hands folded in her lap like sleeping kittens, and none of the nurses know if she sees or if she doesn't see but they can always tell when a day is going to be good or bad depending on what language she speaks, if she politely asks for orange juice this morning with her pills or if she just gabbles at them in a rush of syllables (none of them have a _clue_). Sachiko, on her good days, loves the flowers in the high-walled courtyard, and on her bad days she doesn't see them at all.

She gets a call at work, and she gets one of her friends to substitute for her class, not even having enough time to scrape the finger paint from her manicure because the doctors don't know how long this moment of lucidity will last, it comes and goes so _very_ quickly, heavenly teardrops of shooting stars. But her mother knows her, calls her Sayu, and she throws her arms around her daughter's neck, and they talk until the sun sets, Sayu's eyes watering and her mother's curiously dry, and she says in English, _I would really love to see the cherry blossom trees again…_

Names

She has not been here, not since the day they told her about her son, (the demigod, the mass murderer, but her son nonetheless) it was too painful back then, and it is painful now, because every mother's greatest fear is outliving her children, to stand in her mud-caked shoes and gaze at the grave markers for her husband and child, side by side in the earth, sentinels with kanji etched into their faces. But all Sachiko can think is how those stones did not _ask_ to be gravestones, did not _ask_ to be quarried by humans and their meddling hands, and she knows that her husband did not ask to be a sacrifice, that her son did not ask to be Kira, but they _were_, nonetheless, and the thought is somehow…strangely…comforting.

She is grateful to her husband for his admonishments, saying that browbeating herself won't do anyone any good, that yes, she is across an ocean now, but her friends from the restaurant, they have family there, she'll be looked after, try not to worry so much, it's not good for the baby, you know, at least she's happy. And Sayu is grateful for that last little reminder, his arms looped around her ballooning waist, because she knows the void, and for her it was torture, but her mother's void is subconsciously self-imposed, a well full of gold to drown in, and her mother's happiness puts her mind at ease.

Quilt

She runs her hands over the embroidery of her apron, over the nosegays of pretty flowers patterned on the duvet, thinking how lovely the world was, such a beautiful place, where such wonderful things as true love and laughing children and flowers in full-bloom exist, where an old woman can rest her tired bones and fall into gentle, peaceful slumber. For a moment, she slips into a dream, standing in a grassy field, petals frolicking through the air in an eternal, whipping dance, and she goes to join the silhouettes of two men standing beneath a cherry blossom tree, before she slips away into blissful nothingness.

She is walking past her open bedroom door, wondering if the sudden change in the wind is the Santa Anas coming early, on her way to check on the baby, paranoid she left the window open, when a particularly strong gust of wind bursts through window and blows the blanket from her bed. And Sayu takes one look at the quilt, rumpled like something rudely awakened, at the foot of her bed, and she just _knows_.

Sleep

She cries when she gets the call, cries and laughs at the same time, cries and laughs for what seems like hours, and when that is done she is so confused she only feels numb, from her forehead to her feet, so she goes to look at the baby, asleep in its crib. The baby breathes, and Sayu wonders how her mother did it, losing her husband, losing a child like this, wonders how in the world she ventured forth alone into a strange country, like some fearless warrior, without looking back.

Springtime

"Don't go too far now, Sachi!" she calls, watching her daughter skip down the front steps.

"I won't, Mom!" she yells back, her copper pigtails bouncing with each energetic step.

"And don't get too dirty!"

"I won't, Mom!" she yells, her voice a little fainter. She swings open the door, leaning out, watching her daughter dash down the block.

"Be careful playing in the street!" she yells, raising her voice so she can hear.

"Okay!" Undaunted, her child continues her relentless trek.

She makes a megaphone of her mouth, ready to yell out a million other warnings to her daughter: _Don't talk to strangers, use inside voices, say 'please' and 'thank you', don't stay out too late, _but Sachiko's a smart girl, even at seven she can tell. She's the smartest in all her classes, surrounded by gaggles of giggling friends, littering the refrigerator door with crayon and non-toxic paintings, and at night she listens to her mother tell her stories about her grandma and grandpa and uncle, who she never got to meet because they went up to heaven before she was born. Sayu steps out of her house, standing in the front yard, watching her daughter shrink before abruptly turning right and making a beeline for her best friend's front door.

Sayu smiles to herself, turning back to her house. Her garden is spectacular, inspiring only awe, not envy in her neighbors. It's a beautiful conflagration of flowers; chrysanthemums, bougainvilleas, primroses.

And in the springtime home to a gorgeous, magnificent cherry blossom tree, a ladder towards heaven, its branches spiking away into the sky like cursive writing.

_It was hope_, she thinks, answering that question left abandoned years ago, watching her beautiful daughter sleep. _It was not idealism, not justice, not fate, that made her fearless._

_It was hope._

_-_

_There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon_

_Summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon_

_And she chose a yard to burn but the ground remembers her_

_Wooden spoons, her children stir her bougainvillea blooms_

_There are things that drift away like our endless, numbered days_

_Autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made_

_And she's chosen to believe in the hymn's her mother sings_

_Sunday pulls its children from their piles of fallen leaves_

_There are sailing ships that pass all our bodies in the grass_

_Springtime calls her children till she lets them go at last_

_And she's chosen where to be, though she's lost her wedding ring_

_Somewhere near her misplaced jar of bougainvillea seeds_

_There are things we can't recall, blind as night that finds us all_

_Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls_

_But my hands remember hers, rolling 'round the shaded ferns_

_Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned_

_There are names across the sea, only now I do believe_

_Sometimes, with the windows closed, she'll sit and think of me_

_But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know_

_A baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone._

_--"Passing Afternoons" by Iron & Wine_

* * *

**A/N: **Oh, **dncontest**, how it inspires me. Theme was "Sachiko". I'll admit, at first the prompt was totally uninspiring, but once I sat down to write I-I just got barraged by ideas. I had another submission all lined up, but the magical shuffle setting on my iPod beguiled me to write this.

**Disclaimer: **All characters belong to Ohba-sensei and Obata-sensei, and I make absolutely no claims on any. The song belongs to Iron & Wine, which I refuse to claim other than proclaiming it a beautiful song. Yes, I am foisting my taste upon you all. xD

To review would make me happier than Ryuuzaki confronted with a wedding cake, yep.

x0x0 Raven


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